Here’s a marketing mistake that solopreneurs, small business owners, and Fortune 500 companies make. It’s what you might call an equal opportunity error.
They assume they know exactly who their target customer is. Even worse, they sometimes assume the target customer has a world view similar to their own. It’s not always a fatal error in terms of a company’s success, but it always results in wasted effort, dollars, and potential.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, other businesses operate as if everyone and anyone is their target customer. Trying to be everything to everybody is exhausting… again wasting effort, dollars, and potential.
Instead of making off-base assumptions or avoiding targeting altogether, taking the time to define and create buyer personas focuses your efforts, informs your spending, and optimizes your opportunity. Plus, it’s fun.
Your who is just as important as your what
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you have. Big or small. Just starting out or 15 years in. Hundreds of clients or none… yet. The best way to get where you want to go is to know who is most likely to need (and buy) what you’re selling.
Think about all the time and effort you put into your “what.” When you start a business or pursue a side gig, you do your homework. Whether it’s landscaping services or accounting; freelance writing or computer programming, “what” you deliver to your customers is likely something you’re pretty passionate about. As a result, you know your stuff. And, you love talking about it, explaining it, promoting it.
In other words, you live and breathe your what. Now, ask yourself, how well do you know who values the product, skill, or service you’re offering? Many times, most of the energy goes into the what, why, and how of getting a business off the ground. Sure, the “who” gets some attention in terms of demographics, market sizing, or market research. It just doesn’t always get the deep-dive and follow-through it deserves.
Buyer personas personified
Developing buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics sharpens your marketing as well as your offer. By finding out your ideal customer’s challenges, interests, and what drives them to make a purchase, you can prioritize how you spend your time and your budget. And, you can create messages that speak directly and precisely to your best prospects.
Think of it as a conversation. When you know the person you are talking to, you tailor what you say and how you say it. That’s what buyer personas do for your business. You don’t waste your time talking to the masses.
You can craft your story, your blog, or your campaigns as if you’re talking to someone you know well. And, when you do, your messages cut through the clutter of all of the information that’s flying at everyone these days. Your subject line and your pitch will resonate with your target buyer because you’ve taken the time to know her biggest pain points and how to frame your service to best catch her attention.
Be honest. Do you have detailed profiles of who your target customers are? Do you know what makes them tick? Do you know what makes your ideal buyer different from another person with the same basic demographics? Do you know their favorite social media and online destinations? Do you know hot button frustrations that your product or service solves for each different buyer type?
If you can rattle off the characteristics and personality traits of the best buyer targets for your business, congrats! If your descriptions are one dimensional, it’s time to do a little digging. (This is the fun part.)
How to create buyer personas that drive targeted marketing success
First and always, the buyer personas you develop will be unique to your company. Sure, there are commonalities across certain age groups or industries. But, don’t stop there. Stereotypical, cut-and-paste buyer profiles don’t get specific enough to understand what makes your target customers take action to purchase (or not purchase) your solution.
Instead, your buyer personas need to examine how prospective customer challenges line up (or don’t) with the solutions your company offers. How do you do that? Start by asking questions of yourself and your team.
1. Ask yourself first.
The first step is collecting and compiling everything you already know. This is not what you think you know – or wish is true. Push for fact-based, verifiable information as much as possible.
Talk to everyone on your team who interacts with current customers – sales, service, marketing. (If it’s just you, you’ll be able to check off this step quickly!)
Make sure everyone understands the concept of buyer personas and the expected outcome. Ideally, at the end of the process, you’ll have detailed demographic and psychographic profiles of a few different personas that the team will focus on. You’ll be able to give them names that everyone can refer to them by, such as Technology Tim, Stay-at-Home Mom Melanie, or Entrepreneur Ed.
Once everyone has a vision of where the process is heading, have conversations to extrapolate attributes and behaviors for different segments of your current customer base. Answer questions like the following – incorporating sales, web, or service data points whenever you have them.
- Who are our most common customers? What do they have in common? What are their differences? (Based on that, how can we start to create preliminary customer segments?)
- What questions do our customers ask? Who asks which questions?
- What objections do we run into most frequently? Do we get different objections from different segments of customers?
- Why do our customers tell us they do business with our company vs. a competitor?
- What kinds of people visit our website, call our office, or come into our store? (Look for opportunities to enhance how you capture information about incoming visitors or inbound calls.)
- Which sales or marketing efforts have generated the most interest? Which didn’t? (Examine who responded and who didn’t.)
2. Go straight to the source.
This is THE most important step. If you do nothing else, do this. Using what you’ve compiled internally, initiate ways to ask similar questions of your customers and potential customers. If you don’t have a huge customer base yet, don’t skip this step. Just focus your efforts on potential customers.
The best approach is to set up short customer, informal interviews. You’ll find that people have opinions they will share if you ask them, and in general, most people want to help you as long as you’re respectful of their time. Explain why you’re asking and how you’ll use the information. Consumers like to be heard, and they like to know how their input will be used.
Most importantly, don’t just seek out favorable scenarios. Reach out to customers who, for whatever reason, decided not to buy from you. These will likely deliver the biggest ah-has because the deciding factor is often completely different than what you might think.
Craft a short set of questions that include a mix of queries about their basic demographics, their needs, and challenges, what they’re looking for in your category overall, and their specific experiences with your company. Don’t go too crazy asking a million questions all at once. Look for ways to build in customer feedback surveys throughout your customer interactions to collect different types of information. Online surveys or brief debrief calls following sales decisions work well.
3. Put it all together.
It’s time to bring all the information you’ve captured together. Organize the information by key categories so you can see similarities, patterns, and differences. Here are some standard ways to examine the information:
- Demographics: Look at customer ages, gender, occupation, etc.
- Challenges: Do a deep dive into the intel your customers provided about the problem or pain points they’re seeking to solve. That gets you closest to understanding how your solution can be effectively positioned – or even tweaked – to demonstrate how it addresses persona-specific concerns.
- Behaviors and Key Drivers: Explore how customers shop for solutions like your offering, where they go for information, and how they describe their decision-making process. Look for similarities within different customer segments when it comes to how they express interest in your product or service, how they use it, and the value they place on it.
After you’ve spent time looking at the compiled data points in these areas, personas will emerge. Get creative and turn the information into profiles of fictitious customer types. Price-driven Paul. Early Adapter Eve. Nerdy Ned.
Do a little online research to fill in demographic details to round out each profile. For example, if your sales data and customer interviews point to a Gen Z Zed buyer type, fill in supplemental details like apartment rental rates in your markets, average student loan debts, or social media preferences.
Go as far as selecting a photo of a representative person to fit each persona. Another fun way to personify the target buyers is to capture real quotes from your interviews or create a quote or mantra that sums up the persona’s attitude or outlook.
I like HubSpot’s persona templates as a way to organize your information and build out each persona. In addition to basic identifiers and goals, the templates push you to discover persona-specific views on how your solution applies, the likely objections, and key message points. The templates are free and downloadable here.
Once you have your personas, use them daily and continue to collect and refresh the insights over time. When you do, your buyer personas will be front and center as you develop positioning and product enhancements. And they’ll effectively guide how you create everything from a subject line to a promotional offer.
Looking for creative inspiration for your persona-based content marketing strategy? Turn to Write Hand Ann for targeted blog posts, case studies or email campaigns.
